Thursday, September 16, 2010

Hoggy reminds you of the good ol' days! REVIEW!!!!


HOGGY

Developers: Raptisoft

Platform: iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad (requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later)

Genre: Puzzle Platformer

1 Player

Rating: E for Everyone

Available: Now (FREE via iTunes Store)


Story:

You are a pink slime mold by the name of Hoggy, your girlfriend gets kidnapped and it's up to you to get her back by eating fruit out of 45 jar-world puzzles.
























As it says on their site Hoggy is a side-scrolling puzzler that is inspired by Super Mario Bros and other Nintendo hits.
























Pros:

Well from the jump if you are a fan of the classic NES and SNES games this will be an instant win for you. The jars that you enter and keys that you get after eating all the fruit in the level are straight out of Super Mario Bros 2, as well as the grass platform areas that you walk on. The sound has the 16-bit pop to it, pleasantly enhanced with very old school-pleasant-to-listen-to soundtrack. Watching Hoggy devour everything in sight and the fact that he's pink, makes you think of Kirby. Overall the controls are quite responsive, you tilt the iPhone (or iTouch) from left to right in order to move in said direction. Jumping... well that's a different animal. You see he can't jump, but he CAN stick to the floor or ceiling if you tap the screen, and with a little extra tilt to your weird gravitational jump you can go up and diagonal... sort of. It takes a little time getting used to it because in some levels you need to be PRECISE! The levels (when it comes to the design) are colorful, fun and easy on the eyes. I mean seriously, it really is the love-child of Super Mario 2 and Kirby. The game's difficulty can vary from very simple to downright confusing if you are not the puzzle conquering type when it comes to video games.


Cons

The controls (at first) are VERY VERY frustrating! You sometimes move too fast because you tilted the iPhone (or iTouch) too far OR you don't move fast enough because you aren't tilting it far enough. So some rooms (jars) where you need to be very close to a baddie without touching him you will occasionally slip up and tap him (death) because you can never really tell how much is needed on the tilt.

Nothing to go crazy over because after a solid half an hour on the game you will figure out how to position your hands. The only thing that would be considered a "con" is the varying difficulties. You never really know what you're getting into when you go in certain jars. Some of them (like I said earlier) are embarrassingly easy, while others are so hard that you end up looking for a cheat sheet/walkthrough. It's not gradual. Some hard ones are in the beginning, which when you think about it is no that bad. The one thing you'll realize is that there is NO REPLAY VALUE once you beat it, unless you don't play it for a while.






Overall

A fantastic game, and you can't beat free! Worth trying and hard to put down.


Rating

3.5 out of 5

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